The present invention relates to a system for the input of words using the alphabet and which is capable of application to the input portion of word processors for which the input of texts written in the alphabet is necessary, and machine translation systems that translate texts written in the alphabet into texts in other languages.
The input of words in the alphabet is fundamental to the input of texts written in the alphabet. There is a known technology that uses the electronic dictionary described below for the input of texts written in the alphabet.
Practically all English language word processing softwares such as "Word Perfect" and "Wordstar" are provided with a spelling check dictionary and a function of checking the spelling. There are also many word processing softwares which have a spelling correction function. In a Unix computer operating system, a "spell" command which is a spelling correction function is provided as standard.
In addition, in the English-Japanese word processor "duet" of the Just System Co., Ltd. which handles both the Japanese and English languages, there is an English text spelling check function. There is also a function of displaying the contents of both the Japanese language dictionary and the English language dictionary.
In machine translation systems as well, a machine translation dictionary is used to perform a spelling check after a English text OCR (optical character reader) which is an auxiliary English word input means has read the text. This is described in the pamphlet for the "DUET-E/J" English-to-Japanese machine translation system of the Sharp Co. In addition, there is a machine translation system which is provided with a dictionary for the user's reference independently of the dictionary for machine translation. This is described in the pamphlet for the "HICATS" machine translation system of Hitachi Corp.
In addition, with the above described "DUET-E/J" English-to-Japanese machine translation system, it is possible for the user to specify the type of syntactical element (or grammatical category) of the English word. This is a kind of support function for the system by the user specifying the type of the syntactical element of the word and thus solves the problem of the type of syntactical element being ambiguous when a word has two or more syntactical elements. In this method, for example n xxx is interpreted as xxx of noun ("n--" means noun).
With the Unix, when the character string for search file name is specified for the file information retrieval command such as the `ls` command, and search character string in file is specified for the commands such as `grep` and the like, it is possible for the expression for the arbitrary characters (string) to include the following `wild card` characters.
*: an arbitrary character string PA1 ?: an arbitrary character
When the former file name including a `wild card` character is specified in `ls` command, the `wild card` character can be replaced with the corresponding portion of the existing file name so that there is the effect of abbreviated or shortened input for the file name.
If "ls ab*e" is input, the file names for which the first two characters are "ab" and for which the last character is "e" are searched, for example "abcde" (if existed), and the dictionary information of the searched files are displayed.
In such a conventional technology, when a word in the alphabet is input, it is necessary to use the keyboard to input the entire spelling of the word. This has been extremely inconvenient in view of the input of words for which the spelling is difficult to remember. Moreover, in the UNIX wild card described above, it is possible to shorten the input for file names or search character strings only and thus the range of application of this is limited.